


The ballad of the sugar plum fairy

by eldritcher



Series: Pandemic [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adult Content, Dark, Family, Friendship, Jazz - Freeform, Love, M/M, Obscurials (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:55:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29439321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: Made terribly wise after the Mistake, Dumbledore had life all planned out: Marry a Sentient Castle.
Relationships: Aberforth Dumbledore & Albus Dumbledore, Abraxas Malfoy/Tom Riddle, Albus Dumbledore & Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore & Minerva McGonagall, Albus Dumbledore & Severus Snape, Albus Dumbledore & Tom Riddle, Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald
Series: Pandemic [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137872
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	The ballad of the sugar plum fairy

**Author's Note:**

> Written from John Kirby's 1941-1942 jazz orchestral interpretations of classical music. This is quite unpolished.

**Twentieth Century Closet**

_1938_

In the dingy tavern, my brother and I were alone, but for a vampire that was staved to the grimy glass with a pointy spear. The pub reeked of garlic and decomposing vampire. 

"Aberforth Dumbledore, Vampire Hunter."

"He ate the ear of a longtime patron," my brother grunted. "Ought to see to it, then, oughtn't I?" 

"I had a day of adventure too," I told him, throwing back the dregs of the appalling brew he had poured. 

My brother had three faces. I blinked, and blinked again, and gave it up. He must have spiked the drink with cannabis again. Delirium was not unwelcome. I taught school-children. I deserved all the reprieve I could obtain, even if from my brother's experimental cocktail concoctions. 

"What did you do? Spit in Horace's food?"

I hoped Abe was not spitting in the grub he served his patrons.

"I set a boy's wardrobe on fire." 

Abe poured me another dram of the dubious brew. In return, I settled in to tell the tale of that strange boy in an orphanage. 

"You set an orphan boy's wardrobe on fire?" My brother demanded, scowling. "Albus, that is unethical." 

"You run a pub where your patrons brawl each other to death on Fridays!"

"It is honest work, Albus. I am not stealing candy from children or setting their wardrobes on fire!" 

"A lesson on Nicomachean Ethics!"

"Bugger Nicomachus!" 

"It was written by Aristotle. He named it for his father, or for his son. The historians have no consensus on the matter."

"Bugger Aristotle," Abe said dismissively, relegating to dust my passionate monologue on ethics to be taught in creative ways to young boys of questionable morals. "What I am telling you, Albus, is that it isn't right. It isn't right to set young children on fire."

Wait. It had been a wardrobe, not a child. 

"Setting young children on fire is bad for your reputation," my brother told me sagely. 

Well, I could not disagree with this assertion. I sighed and settled in to drink up the rest of his foul and marvelous brew. 

If we ended up conjuring ostriches to run through the streets of Hogsmeade, singing _Good King Wenceslas_ , nobody complained too vociferously. The villagers agreed, unanimously, that they had seen worse exploits emanating from the hellpit that was Hog's Head. 

\----

A young boy of questionable morals was sorted into Slytherin. 

"The Castle is fond of Riddle," Armando told me, as we walked about the grounds together.

I liked these walks. There were always miscreants to take points from, skulking about committing acts of mischief they ought not to. Armando and I would take points from them, and when their faces became long in rue, we would award them lemon-drops to console. The children hated lemon-drops. This confection was an acquired taste of a sophisticated palate. 

"Fond of Riddle, you say?" I asked Armando, curious. He knew the pulse of the Castle better than any other that dwelt in her. 

The bond of a Headmaster to the Castle was irrevocable. 

Long, long ago, the Founders Four had raised these stones to shelter, and they had done so by pouring the magic of many wizards into the Castle. She had come to sentience, to life, having gorged on the magic of wizards. 

To sustain her, there would be a Headmaster at all times, one sworn to her in absoluteness. When he died, his magic would become hers. Before he died, as he dwelt in her, they would slowly become one and the same, the Castle and her Headmaster. 

Armando knew the Castle, for his mind was inseparable from her sentience.   
  
"A heir," Armando mused. "The House Elves see to his care at her bidding, following him with tea and biscuits. They knitted for him a tatty woolen blanket from tea-cosies."

A heir. A heir that the Hat had sorted into Slytherin without a moment's contemplation. The boy's wand had one of Fawkes's feathers at its core, Ollivander had written to me. 

\----

The Blue Church in Bratislava was built in the Hungarian Secessionist style. A tad on the nose, as a choice of locale, but Gellert had never been one for subtlety. 

"This was a mistake," I said, as I said every time after one of our encounters. 

Gellert smirked, used to my reproaches after the act, and began dressing hastily. 

"In a hurry to burn down Europe?" 

"My cause cannot wait for postcoital caresses," he retorted. 

"Gellert-" I began, before shaking my head and falling silent. 

What was there to be said? 

We had found ourselves incapable in weaning us of this mistake. So we carried on, when we could, in no man's lands we chose, and then we went our ways, to condemn each other before all in spite and bitter loathing, as only lovers of once might. 

A blood pact had saved us from dueling each other. 

Every morning, when I read the Prophet's reporting on his heinous crimes and schemes, I hated myself for knowing relief anew that he had had the forethought to bind us from harming each other in battle. 

There was no love left, not after 1899. 

Yet, we returned to each other, to grasp and take as brutes, and there were no kisses to our ugly dance. 

"Your magic has changed," he said then.

I cut off the tendrils of his exploration. 

"Ancient stone, gorged on blood magic," he rambled on, and his curiosity about old magic had first drawn me to him long ago when we had been children dreaming together of might's right. 

The Castle. He meant the Castle. 

Armando had begun making sounds about how it was time to fade away into the gloaming. He lamented to me often of how he woke each day and found himself wearier than he had been the day before. 

The Castle, knowing his days were numbered, was courting me with curls of her ancient magic that clung as perfume to mine. 

* * *

**One Alone**

_**1941** _

"What will you do?" Abe asked quietly.

The blood pact was broken by Newt Scamander's valiant efforts. 

War raged in Europe. They were calling for my involvement, Ministers and International Law Enforcement both. The Americans were furious. Armando had banned all visitors from the Castle. The Castle herself, protective of her chosen Headmaster, had not allowed politicians and warmongers entry. 

In Scotland, in winter, I hid in the Castle and her magic lulled me into a fatal lie of peace as hundreds fought and died across the Channel. 

\----

The Zagreb Cathedral had seen thousand years of conquerors and tyrants. 

Gellert was not subtle. 

"That Castle of yours has a strange magic running through her," he said, distracted, as I drew him into passion's wrestle. The bats in the sacristy fled as we enacted folly once more. 

I had taken a risk by seeking him. He read magic easily. He always had. It was the language he was most proficient in. Amidst the clatter of the Castle's magic, overwhelming all, he had not sensed yet the rupture of the blood pact. 

"A young magic," Gellert rambled on, unable to shut up whenever a curiosity of old sorcery came to his attention. "Blossoming, stronger than ours had been at that age. A new lover?"

"You and I are not lovers," I reminded him.

He said nothing to that, silenced by my statement. Good. 

Only, in our embrace of two, I knew loneliness then. 

"We should not repeat this," I told him, as he dressed hastily after our encounter. 

"We shan't," he assured me. 

The resolve he wore plain told me that we would not repeat this mistake again. 

\----

I returned, one alone. 

\----

The Castle caught me in her magic's embrace, comforting me with her ancient songs of stone and spell, imbued with the sorcery of the Founders and the Headmasters.

Slow healed the old wounds of her left by Slytherin's desertion, as Salazar's heir poured his magic to patch her in the places where she was torn by betrayal.

"The boy knows what he is doing," Armando told me, as we read the Runes in the Castle's bedrock together.

"There are no books that explains the how of this, even in the Restricted Section. He is making it up as he goes, isn't he?" I mused. 

"Intuition is a cornerstone of elemental magic," Armando reminded me. "He is beloved to the Castle. Her secrets glow bright to welcome him into her conduits."

Tom Riddle was a remarkable boy, despite his lack of interest in practicing Nicomachean ethics. 

\----

So there were three, that Christmas. 

Armando's magic, absorbed into the stones and the rafters of the Castle, was fading into life's twilight. 

The Castle had chosen her next Headmaster, and in songs of courting she wooed me to her. I resisted, as fiercely as I could, fearing that succumbing to the Castle's call would spell the end of Armando's life. 

A Headmaster in name that she had no use for, and a Headmaster in waiting that she eagerly awaited. 

And then there was an heir, who was mending the ancient betrayal of Salazar committed upon stone and nave. 

Armando's magic was soft as dusk, pink-ochre, a day dying. Mine was the bright-blue of an ocean under sunlight, shifting and turbulent, wise and bloodied and betrayed and made of mistakes, mirroring that of the Castle herself. I knew why she had chosen me. Riddle's magic was evergreen, an expanse of youth's supple velveteen, as the yew he carried, and in its eternal song was a son's yearning for a mother. 

"There must only be one as the Castle's master," Armando told me bleakly. 

* * *

**Arabian Nightmare**

**_1942_ **

Abraxas Malfoy was dying from the poliovirus. The disease had ravaged his nervous system rapidly, in a matter of hours, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. 

His father, furious and frightened, was standing guard in the Hospital Wing, outside the bubble of protection that he had been isolated in. 

\-----

"Grindelwald has slaughtered his way across Normandy," Horace said, sighing, as he read the Prophet over my shoulder, while buttering his toast. "It shall be a matter of months to cross the Channel." 

"Not if the Americans manage to raise an offensive in time," Armando said calmly. 

His hands shook as he brought his teacup to his lips. Weakening rapidly, day by day, he held on to life in case I was killed in war, lest we leave the Castle without a Headmaster.

The Castle screamed then, through the conduits of our shared magic, and Armando fell face-first into his plate of breakfast, clutching his heart in agony. 

Horace yelled for assistance, and the other Professors were bustling about trying to aid the Headmaster. 

I staved off her wild and frightened emotion with a wave of the rising tide of my magic, binding her to obedience, to silence, to calm.

Then, furious, I rushed to the Hospital Wing. 

The bubble that had been spelled about Abraxas's bed was torn down. He was trying to speak, in vain, weakened as he was. 

Hyperion Malfoy stood between his son and a thrashing boy on the floor, and his wrath was the red of the Cruciatus. There was a broken gramophone beside the boy he was striving to break. The Castle pulsed against my reign, clamoring to aid Riddle, her son, the heir. 

"Enough!" I shouted, as the Castle's magic surged. Hyperion would die if she woke to force. I stunned the foolish man. 

Abraxas had survived death. In his magic ran Tom Riddle's, as a bond sacrosanct, pouring into him life's breath on evergreen's wings. 

I swore profusely and helped Tom up. He was still trembling from the power of Hyperion's curse. 

"I have it in hand," he told me boldly.

"No, you bloody don't," I retorted. "Foolish child! You cannot fathom the depths of your idiocy!" 

"I meant to save him. I did," he said, bright-eyed folly manifest. 

The Castle's magic tore through the dam I had raised, and went to him, soothing and healing, sentient and clumsy. I tutted and healed him myself before the Castle could do damage in her exuberance to see him restored. The bright-blue of her magic washed a lick of love against my magic, pleased by my deed. 

Love. 

The castle loved us both. 

The poliovirus, as any Muggle epidemic that crossed from their world to ours, tore through the immune systems of the purebloods, killing them swiftly, and draining them of magic first, for magic was their bodies' immune response. 

Tom had bound himself to Abraxas. The rite was that which bound House-Elves to the masters of their household. The rite was that which bound the Headmaster to the Castle. 

In times of old, the serfs had been bound to their feudal lords so. In times recent, the American Wizarding Economy had been built on slavery of wizard to wizard through this rite. 

"I hope you shan't regret this when he wakes to find you a House Elf bound to him," I spat at Tom, blood curdling in anger at what he had done without forethought. 

Impulsive child! If Armando died, if I fell to Gellert, then the Castle would have only him left. 

"I am not a House Elf," Tom said brightly. 

"The rite-" 

"We love each other." 

His confidence was brazen. Born of obsession and love-potion, born of treachery and spite, unwanted and discarded child that he was, what would he know of love? 

My parents had loved me. My sister had loved me. My brother loved me. And yet, I had not been the first to forswear the mistake of 1899. 

The Castle's magic burned in my veins, chiding. 

She had taught the boy what love was. 

I bit down my helpless wrath and forcefully concealed it from her. She was an ancient sentience, raised of magic and blood, and what she knew of love was betrayal's sting and the submission to Headmasters one after another. 

"Don't come to me when you find out what love is not," I barked, and left him there to his victory's spoils, to a crippled boy sustained from breath to breath by his magic's evergreen willingly bound. 

\----

"A nightmare!" Abe declared, as he poured me another. 

"A nightmare," I agreed, woebegone, weeping on his shoulder. 

"Well, you had best see to matters in Europe before Armando dies," he said, practical as ever. 

I sniffled. 

"There, there," he said, comforting me with a distracted pat to my head, as if I were one of the Crups he took in now and then before a vampiric patron made feast of them. 

"Gellert-"

"Pish!" Abe declared. "You did not love him, Albus. It was only a childhood folly."

Abe did not know that I had sought Gellert, again and again, until Gellert had finally ended our encounters in 1941, after Zagreb. 

"If I die-" 

"You are not to die!" Abe ordered. "You are more skillful than him, Albus. Don't doubt yourself now. Go on. Lock him up somewhere."

"You are not asking for death," I whispered, overwhelmed by my brother's perspicuity.

"You are not his judge, jury, or executioner," he told me gently. "If upon you falls his capture, so be it. His sentence is not yours to pass."

My brother's forgiveness, at our sister's funeral, remained the only reason why I had applied myself to purpose and penance, after her death. His forgiveness had been the bulwark that had led me to Hogwarts, to seek a lowly teaching position, to curb ambition and folly, to spend the rest of my life in service. 

He was a better man than I was. 

"You will be the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts has seen," Abe told me, striving to cheer me up. 

Betrayed and frightened of love, and yet wanting it desperately, the Castle clung to her heir. The bright-blue of her ancient magic, sentient, matched my own. 

We were the same, she and I, creatures of folly that knew not to love and yet keened to be held safe in love's arms. 

* * *

  
  


**The Ballad of the Sugar Plum Fairy**

**1945**

I wound up in the Forbidden Forest, bleeding and weeping, mourning what I had conquered that day. 

The Castle clamored, calling me to her. Armando's soft wisps of sunset's ochre was missing from her ebullient blue that summoned. Tendrils of evergreen held back her surge, calming her with lullabies spelled from yew.

Tom found me in the Forest, that night. He was in his school robes, still. He must have come from the examination halls. 

"You skipped the Leaving Feast," I muttered, coughing up blood, knelt in a clearing under the stars of the constellation of Delphinus; the only stars which remained unobscured that night in the southern skies. 

Job's coffin, they called the asterism of Delphinus. Job's coffin. They had nailed shut Gellert in his castle of stone, buried living in a coffin he had raised. 

"A new wand," Tom mused. Seeing my scowl, he hastily turned his attention to casting a few healing spells to mend me as best as he could.

"At least, the Castle is still standing," I said bleakly. I had not thought that she might survive, should Armando die while I was away. Armando had often told me that I underestimated Tom. 

"I am quite capable of placating her," Tom said. "Come now. Your brother has been panicking, when they told him that they could find no traces of you after the battle." 

"You could have told him that I was alive." 

The Castle would have known were I to die. 

"I could have," Tom agreed. 

Bastard child. 

Why was I stuck with him? 

The castle curled to his evergreen's sweep as a kneazle long left in the cold taken in. Right. The Castle had shown she had no sense, hearkening to him. 

\----

I stood over the bedrock's runes, and bound to me the Castle's secrets, in marriage, in bond, in service. 

Her, I would serve, to my death. In my death, my magic would be hers. 

And I, her master, and she thrashed fierce as I barred from her the heir she loved. 

Only one must bind to her. 

\----

In the dingy tavern, my brother and I were alone, but for a vampire that was staved to the grimy glass with a pointy spear. The pub reeked of garlic and decomposing vampire. 

"I barred the boy from the Castle." 

"Was that necessary? Is it about your Nicomachean ethics again?" 

I blinked, trying to pinpoint which one of Abe's three faces was real. He had not gone light on the drugs this time. Over his head, I hallucinated a wonky halo. 

"Albus?"

"He bound himself to Abraxas," I explained. "Cheated death." 

"Cheated death?" Abe asked, frowning. "Is that the marijuana speaking?" 

"No, no, he did it," I said, and wished my brother would take me seriously despite my slurred words. "He saved Abraxas. With his magic. Then he was frightened it might not be enough. So he cut up his soul, for the soul is magic, and stashed away pieces of it."

"So that Abraxas might live even if he dies." 

"Yes." 

"And a soul, carved up into fragments, is a dangerous thing, I assume."

"Unnatural. Dangerous. Unstable. Even he cannot control his mind as it falls to tatters."

"So you barred him from the Castle." 

"I am her Headmaster. I must protect her." 

"You said that the Castle was a tempering influence on the boy." 

I scowled. 

"You may well have taken away the only restraint he had heeded," Abe pointed out, pragmatic. 

Seeing the fear on my features, he sighed, and poured us more, so that I could be lulled into oblivion. 

"It was his fault." 

Abe hummed. 

"I know. He was a child, you say. He was a peculiar and unsettling child whose follies were driven by impulse and infatuation," I reminded him. "His follies were not the follies of a child, Abe." 

"The Castle's magic, twined with his, was an advantage you held over him, as long as the Castle has you as her master," Abe said. "Cutting him from her serves nothing." 

"I don't want another war," I muttered. 

I had not finished mourning Ariana. I had not begun mourning Gellert. 

"Oh, Albus, the road to hell is paved with-"

"Don't," I begged him. 

* * *

**Rehearsing for a nervous breakdown**

_**1948** _

  
I went to Tom, where he was ensconced in that pawnshop of ignominy. 

"What are you doing here?" he demanded, duster in hand, not looking up from where he was bent over a cursed codpiece that was spitting flesh-eating locusts. 

The gramophone was playing jazz. 

The magic of him was effervescent, drunk on happiness, and upon its evergreen hummed merry the songs of love. 

I scowled and suppressed my jealousy. 

"Do you require help?" 

"I have it well in hand," he muttered, turning the locusts to dust as he stripped the codpiece of its ancient curse. 

"I came to negotiate," I told him plainly. 

The Castle had sulked for three years. I had been driven batty. The House Elves moped, leaks sprung everywhere, and the students complained about mischievous staircases and slippery floors and chandeliers that wobbled precariously overneath their little heads. 

And he had bloody jinxed the Defense against the Dark Arts position. Three years, and three teachers later, I had had it. I loathed interviewing candidates. 

"Tea?" He asked politely, and nipped into the little alcove where he had set up a kitchen in flagrant violation of Ministry Workplace Health Enforcement laws. 

He emerged with tea and shortbread. 

"Keeping your culinary passions alive, I see." 

"Abraxas adores me in an apron," he said sweetly, evil gremlin child that he was.

They kept house together in Malfoy Manor. Abraxas had flouted Hyperion's dictates and pleas, and had taken Tom boldly and openly as his lover. While they were the souls of propriety in society, it was evident to any that looked that it was a marriage.

Perversion, they called it in our times, among our people. I had hidden my inclinations as long as I had lived. Only my brother and a man buried alive in a coffin of stones knew. 

"Someday, he shall need to wed and sire an heir," I warned Tom. 

He said nothing to that.

"Well?"

"Well? I am content in my today and refuse to borrow tomorrow's troubles," he parried. "Yes, he must wed and sire. Yes, he might discard me then, to be seen worthy in the eyes of his son. The condemnation of his child may well end what the condemnation of society could not. Will you be content then, to see me scorned, so that I am as miserable as you are?" 

He narrowed his gaze then, and added tiredly, "More miserable I shall be than you ever were, I should say, for you have the Castle and you have barred me from her." 

He was a bright child, but a foolish and amoral one. His idiocy would see us all destroyed, lest I kept watch. 

"Nicomachean ethics would have served you."

"It is too late for that now."

"I came to negotiate." 

He waved at me to proceed, and poured us both more tea. 

"She needs us both."

He looked up at that, startled. Caught by surprise, he fell silent, wide-eyed, wanting. 

"The balance of powers must be kept," I hastened to add. "I am her Headmaster, enshrined in the seat of Hogwarts. You are the heir, chosen and dear to her. She may not have your presence in form, but she may have your magic."

"Show me how," he demanded, keen, without affecting even a facade of politeness. 

"Nicomachean ethics-"

"Bugger Aristotle! Show me how." 

I took his hands in mine. He had small and delicate hands. Dainty, as a lady's. Upon their surface I saw specks of alien pale blurred. I looked up at him in shock. There, in his bright eyes, was bleeding's red. Through the conduit of magic, I saw for the first time, the fraying on his evergreen. 

He had cut up his soul. And his magic was falling apart. 

"Magic is soul, and soul is magic," I said gently. "Remorse-"

"How can I nurse a whit of remorse when I would act to save him, even if I had known?"

"This is the beginning, Tom." 

"I know." 

He was old and weary and blazing in love. 

There was nothing to be said. 

So I took my magic, surging waves of blue might, and guided his fraying green to the Castle, to the places where she welcomed him greedily, as a mother awaiting her prodigal son. 

* * *

**Haydn gets Hep**

_**1965** _

"He adopted a child?"

"A murderess child," I told Abe. 

"No less a child," Abe said staunchly, willing to see the best in Tom Riddle, as he had once seen the best in his foolish brother. 

Tom Riddle had little left in him, soul or magic or mind, that spoke of the best of him, whatever that might have been. 

When he had cut up his soul, he and I had known that his magic would follow in disintegration. Yet, neither of us had predicted that his mind would be collateral damage. 

In insanity's clutches, slowly fading, he had brought war to our country. He remained untouchable, in Malfoy Manor, where the magic of the house and its master remained resolute in love's protection.

Abraxas had raised his son to love Tom. Abraxas, crippled and weakening, having lived well beyond a polio survivor's natural lifespan, sustained by Tom's magic from breath to breath, remained the last and precarious hold on Tom's sanity. 

"He wishes you to send an accelerated Hogwarts letter to this child," Abe mused. 

"Narcissa Black, the last of Druella's and Cygnus's children," I explained. 

"Cygnus killed Druella, didn't he?" 

"Yes, and the girl killed Cygnus. Self-defence, I must add."

"Euripides would have found them excellent muses," Abe tutted. 

My brother was a barkeep who spoke frequently of the Ancient Greeks. Us Dumbledores were an odd lot. 

"I found the house stripped clean of the girl's magic. Only Tom's magic lingered in the air. His notion of chivalry, I imagine, to conceal her crime." 

"Well, that was sensible of him. What is a girl of ten to do in Azkaban? You know how our justice system treats these children, even if they acted in self-defence. What brought Riddle's attention to a ten year old child?" 

"Cygnus was starving her," I said tiredly. 

The boy had been starved in an orphanage. He had a peculiar, if understandable, phobia surrounding hunger. What kindness was in him, he showed the hungry. 

"You sent the letter, didn't you?" Abe asked, gentle, gentle as only he was to me. 

"Better that the child is at Hogwarts than with him," I muttered. 

\-----

I kept a close eye on the girl, when she came to Hogwarts. 

She swung between eating little and then too much. Starveling child, frightened of others, she clung to her sister, to Bellatrix Black. When alone, she kept quiet as a mouse, and drew little attention to herself. 

"Bulimia," Minerva whispered to me, when she took notice of where my gaze lingered. "Horace and I have been trying to cajole Miss Black to take nutrition potions."

"What causes it?"

"Childhood starvation. A fear of scarcity." Minerva sighed. "It is hard to attribute it to a single cause, Albus. We must speak to her guardian." 

\-----

Minerva went with me to Malfoy Manor. 

She had a cordial rapport with Tom. They had been acquaintances on convivial terms during their days at Hogwarts, and they had maintained correspondence of a form afterwards. 

I found myself protective of her. 

Her judgement in love was as poor as mine. She longed for Alastor Moody, though he had wanted nothing of her. Then, in war's turn, he had come to her offering a tryst with no strings. Greedy for something, even if it was ephemeral and meaningless, she had agreed. 

"Stop contemplating my choices," she said sharply, as we walked together up an arboreal path of ash trees. 

"It is a friend's privilege to be allowed to worry on your behalf," I retorted. She suppressed a grin. 

"Charmer."

"Only for you!" I promised.

She rolled her eyes. 

The House Elves announced us, and led us to a small patio in the gardens, where under a pergola was laid out tea. 

Abraxas waited for us in his wheelchair. Pale, weak and immobile, his face wore the chronic pain of his existence in quiet dignity. 

"Professor McGonagall, Headmaster Dumbledore," he greeted us. 

"We came to speak to you of your charge," Minerva said politely. 

"Which of my charges?" he asked, amused. Minerva laughed at that. 

"If we came to speak of Riddle, we would have come with an arrest warrant and a battalion of Aurors," she replied. 

"He is not here today," Abraxas said lightly. "You wished to discuss Narcissa?"

"The girl has an eating disorder," she said, turning solemn. "These matters often hide deeper concerns." 

"Riddle has it in hand," Abraxas reassured us. "We had noticed this, when she came to us first. Cygnus had treated her poorly. We are hopeful that she will make a full recovery. She is a child. She has a child's resilience."

"He means to modify her memories, to soften the experiences of her childhood."

Abraxas said nothing to that, circumspect as ever with his words and tells, shielding his lover with unsurpassed protectiveness. 

I had once warned Tom that Abraxas might desert him, when society's and family's condemnation weighed down their childhood's infatuation. I had once judged that Abraxas might seek to exploit the asymmetrical bond of magic's slavery that existed between them. 

Abraxas had proven me wrong on all counts. 

He remained a madman's last sanctuary. 

* * *

**Rustle of Spring**

_**1975** _

"Cheer up," I told Minerva. 

She scowled at me. 

"Drink up," Abe tried. 

That she hearkened to.

"I told you not to attempt that liaison," I tried again. 

She scowled. 

"He was an arse. Good riddance to bad rubbish!" Abe went on. 

She nodded and downed her dram of whiskey. 

\---

I ran into Narcissa in Blackheath. Hatted and cloaked, she was hurrying in the rain. I conjured a most flamboyant umbrella, in bright blue, and went to assist her. 

"Headmaster!" she exclaimed, surprised, blinking the rain out of her eyes. 

Her magic was curious, blossoms of hawthorn to which clung scraps of evergreen. _Storge_ , the love of a man for his family. I had not thought him capable of love, beyond obsession's make. 

"How are you, Mrs. Malfoy?"

"Quite well, quite well," she stammered, flushing, as if unused to the address. 

Lucius, they said, had an American mistress, a divorcee, Wallis. 

It was a marriage of convenience. Narcissa was held dear by both Abraxas and Tom. She had little inclination to wed or play a man's wife, uninterested in the matters of sex as she had been since her schooldays. Lucius would not demand anything of her she was unwilling to give. And her place remained secure in their odd family. 

Society's tongues wagged of her tale. She had been a quiet and withdrawn child. She had turned into a retiring young woman, rarely stepping outside the manor. 

"A trip to Florean's?" I suggested to her. She had been fond of ice cream as a child at Hogwarts. 

"I must return home," she said apologetically. "Abraxas expects me for tea."

Abraxas was bedridden. With Tom occupied in matters of war, and with Tom's sanity fraying to nothingness, Abraxas's health had been deteriorating. Tom was panicking, I had heard, and meant to end the war at any cost, frightened as he was by Abraxas's decline. In his desperation to pour magic into Abraxas, he had accelerated in turn the degradation of his mind. 

Love was a vicious cycle. 

And spring rustled, even in winter's cruel claws, as young hawthorn that bloomed soft in their home of blues. 

\---

"That boy is sweet on you," I told Minerva at supper. 

Severus Snape, all of fifteen, was scowling at his treacle tart, and whenever he dared, cast a yearning glance at the Head Table.

Oh, I had seen this a hundred times. The Castle tickled my magic, mischievous, in spring's thaw. She had seen this many hundred times, and wanted to rub that in my face. 

Sentient stones that I had married. 

Love brimmed in me, for her sacrifice-wrought, hungering magic's blue. Tom's magic was ruthless and grim on the battlefields, but here, in her heart, held in love, it remained evergreen velveteen in eternal youth. 

"He carries a torch for you," I whispered to Minerva.

"Why are you whispering?" she demanded, rapping her silver spoon on my knuckles in annoyance. 

"The boy-"

"Bloody nuisance!" she exclaimed, irked. "He is a child of fifteen. Take your romantic fantasies of spring's frivolity elsewhere." 

Oh, she would come to see.

She would come to see.

I had never been wrong. 

Well, I had been wrong in the matter of Tom's infatuation with Abraxas. I had also been wrong in the matter of my own heart.

I had not been wrong when it came to women! A pity that I wanted to seduce none of them. I might have proven rather good at it.

"Albus." 

"Yes, Minerva?" 

"You are scaring the children with your scheming smile over a course of pudding." 

"Merely the smile of a man steeped in life's wisdom." 

"Refrain from steeping in wisdom at supper, then." 

* * *

  
  


**Roseroom**

_**1985** _

"Mrs. Malfoy," I greeted her politely.

That young girl, quiet and retiring, was a woman sure of her place, as she waved me to a chair across the desk she was ensconced behind. This was her dominion, this manor where only she remained.

Her husband and son were with his American divorcee in Belfast. 

Her sister, the one that had not foresworn her, was in Azkaban. 

Abraxas was six-feet in the ground. He had died of a broken heart after Godric's Hollow, starved of his Tom's magic, as Merope had died on the streets of London, starved of her Tom's love. 

"I understand that you visited Privet Drive."

"I visited Harry," Narcissa acknowledged, calm and circumspect. Her magic was a faint thing, mostly extinguished but for a last guttering flame. 

"You poured your magic into his scar." 

"I fed him a chocolate frog," she said absently. "He was a hungry child. They called him a freak. He was toiling in his aunt's garden under the noonday summer's sun."

There were reasons to keep him there, where his mother's blood lived. 

"You poured your magic into his scar, Narcissa."

"I did not harm him, Headmaster." 

I knew that. How had Narcissa known to seek the boy? How had she come to suspect the truth of the scar? 

In 1981, when I had held the boy, the Castle had clung to him too, weeping in lamentation, for hedges of holly grew strong and poisoned with thorns the tattered evergreen wisps that had been staved to the boy's magic. 

Narcissa had mended the evergreen, pouring her magic to repair its seams and render it whole. 

"He lives." 

"He exists," she said quietly. 

"He is a threat to you, as he is a threat to our country, should he return," I warned her. 

Proud, resolute, she held my gaze, and said, "I shall welcome him home, Headmaster. You cast him out from the Castle. I will not cast him away from these stones, where he was loved and cherished."

Lily Potter had sacrificed her magic for her boy. Narcissa Malfoy had sacrificed her magic for a man who had cut up his soul on love's foolish altar. 

"You have mended his soul," I told Narcissa gently. "His mind is dissolute and cannot be restored even by the most accomplished of Healers."

"I have faith," she said, and hers was a winter's smile. 

Chthonic as an Iron Queen shrined in the underworld, she remained unwavering, without magic, without allies, without reason to hope. 

\----

"Mrs. Malfoy seems quite the dangerous woman," Abe told me, as we drank together. 

"She is foolish and determined." 

"A most dangerous combination." 

\-----

In the Carpathian wilderness, in a coffin of stones, I had buried a man alive. 

We had not been lovers. 

Had that been our mistake? 

No, I decided. Love had not served Tom or Abraxas. It had driven one to insanity and the other to dying of a broken heart after a life's worth of daily agony. 

\----

In Harry's magic, entwined in its holly's joyful red remained mourning's verdure sweep of another, healed by a woman's sacrifice. 

* * *

**Prelude**

_**1996** _

"Mrs. Malfoy asked for a negotiation," Kingsley told us at the joint Order-Ministry meeting. "She guarantees Professor Minerva McGonagall's safety, should we accept." 

"Mrs. Malfoy?" Fudge warbled, surprised. 

Narcissa was left to fight the war that madmen had begun before her. Tom must have stepped away, knowing how precarious his soundness of mind was. He trusted her to do what needed be done. Bellatrix was his soldier, but Narcissa was his heir. 

\---

At Gala, by the River Tweed, Narcissa Malfoy waited for us. 

"Mrs. Malfoy," Fudge began, pompous and frowning. "We were expecting You Know Who."

"He is occupied with other matters," she said quietly, dressed in plain black, thin and unremarkable in her willowy grace of middle age. "Professor Dumbledore, Minister Fudge, he sent me with his terms."

The immediate cessation of hostilities. Minerva's safe return in exchange for several prisoners we had in custody. The raising of a Wall of magic on the old Anglo-Scottish border by the River Tweed, carving our country into two. 

"Peace in our times," I remarked. 

"Peace in our times," Narcissa agreed softly. 

"I wish to speak to him." 

She nodded, and led me to him, where he was alone by the river, under an ash tree. 

Draped in mourning's evergreen, he was whole and sane, wisened by grief, a widower left by the river's edge under the stars of Job's coffin. The threads of his magic, gently mended, were of hawthorn's grace. 

The Castle surged in joy as the soft waves of him, as river's mellow current, came to the turbulence of blue I held dominion over, greeting her magic in love's eventide, prodigal son returned to her. 

"Dumbledore," he greeted me. 

"Tom, you are well." 

He nodded. 

"Narcissa won your war for you."

She was the child he had saved in 1961. 

She was the woman that had saved him nearly half a century later, mending him to a semblance of wholeness with her magic and her resolve. _Storge_ , the love of a man for his family, mantled them heavy in filial white and gold. 

"You underestimated her," he told me. 

"You underestimated her too," I pointed out. 

It was a mark of the truce he meant to keep that he did not naysay the truth I had spoken to him. 

We watched the river run home, to the North Sea. 

In the mingled magic of us, the Castle rejoiced and hers was a song of psalms offered to the highest of highs. 

\----

"Professor!" 

It was Harry. He came rushing to my side, bolstering me steady, as I wobbled about on shaky legs. 

Gentle, warm, true, his magic clung to mine in concern. 

"It is quite all right," Severus muttered, coming to us. "He is drunk as a skunk. He must have been at his brother's."

Gremlin that he was, he fed me one of his most noxious sobering potions. 

"I did not drink for four hours to be made sober in a jiffy," I complained. 

"You set a terrible example for Mr. Potter," Severus said wickedly.

"I don't mind," Harry said, laughing. "I was worried that you were ill, Professor." 

"Albus," I insisted. 

"Dumbledore," the boy negotiated. 

"Minerva has whiskey flowing in her quarters," Severus suggested. 

So we went to Minerva's quarters, all of us. Severus and Harry fought over her keg of Guinness. I settled beside Minerva on the chaise and watched them squabble. 

"That boy carries a torch for you," I told Minerva, for the umpteenth time in two decades. 

"I know," she said quietly, and hers was the quiet of a woman that had resolved her heart.   
  
Gladdened to see her long loneliness end, I embraced her, this dear friend of mine who was my crutch and cause. 

"Firenze is sweet on you," she told me with a wink then. 

I stared at her in befuddled surprise. 

\----

Firenze came to me, speaking of his stars and the signs there, and his was a cutting wit and a heart that gave freely. 

Of disparate kind, we were neither of us given to the physicality of a liaison, but sex was not necessary for an intimacy of the heart. 

After 1899, a century later, I woke to love again. 

\----

"So you talk at each other?" Abe asked, puzzled. 

He had no right to be puzzled. He was a barkeep who kept drugging my drinks. There was a dead vampire staved to his wall. The pub stank to high hell of garlic and decomposing vampiric remains. 

How dare he judge my liaison? 

"We converse," I corrected my silly brother. "We converse at length of matters dear and abstract. Neither of us are interested in pursuing interspecies intercourse." 

"And here I thought you hankered after Grindelwald because of his muscled haunches."

"Abe!" 

He poured me another. 

"We have given each other permission to seek our own kind, should physicality be necessary to address," I informed him, and wished the words had not sounded as sanctimonious as they had. When Firenze had spoken them, it had seemed quite normal. 

Abe was struggling to keep a straight face.

"So you may plough other fields," he suggested, and doubled over, chortling. 

* * *

**Beethoven Riffs On**

_**2001** _

I was in Bonn, attending to a small matter of import in the German Ministry of Magic. 

Hungry after dealing with the bureaucratic vagaries of the Germans, I made my way to the riverfront. The Castle's magic stirred in curiosity, as it sensed the proximity of another it knew well. 

Sure enough, Tom was in one of the little cafes tucked away by the riverside, arguing with a baker about the right quantity of caraway seeds for the perfect Zwiebelkuchen. He startled when I crossed the threshold, and the magic of the Castle rushed in giddy happiness to him. 

By the Rhine, we met again, five years after our meeting by the Tweed.

"You and I, and the rivers that we walk by," I told Tom merrily. 

"We cannot be seen together. There would be uproar on both sides of our Wall," he said, fretful, looking about to and fro, as if expecting prurient journalists to pop out of the ether with Quick Quotes Quills and cameras. 

"I have a chalet," I offered merrily, knowing well that the curious beast he was would not refuse to accompany me. "We may converse there in privacy."

Minerva and Tom, the finest of their generation, and undone by bravado and curiosity. 

So we went to the little chalet I had rented in the Siebengebirge. He was terse in his answers to my queries, but mellow in magic and in mien, as he fussed about in the tiny kitchenette and the larder, striving to scrounge up for us a meal of the Rhineland-Palatinate.

Rheinischer Sauerbraten, from horse meat, I suspected they no longer served in any respectable restaurant. Tom was utterly aghast when I informed him of this state of affairs, and insisted upon adherence to tradition; horse meat he served. 

He made the marinade from scratch, of mustard seeds, pepper, dill, coriander, bay leaves, allspice, juniper berries, basil, caraway seeds, cloves, cinnamon, and tarragon.

"Narcissa is fond of this preparation," he was saying, as he gracefully moved about the cluttered kitchenette, steaming and slicing, sautéing and roasting, brining and rinsing. The aroma of spices and meat hung cloying to him, and the Castle's magic danced merry jigs about ours at this unexpected meeting.

"How is the fair Narcissa?" 

"Quite well," he replied. "She has taken up knitting."

She had darned him to intactness. It boded well for her exploits on thread, surely. 

"And Minerva?" he asked, distracted as he strained the marinade carefully into a pot. 

"You write to her. She writes to you."

He fell silent at that. 

"Severus suits her," I offered, to quell the uncomfortable and awkward silence we had relapsed into. 

"Severus has carried a torch for her since 1974," he remarked. 

Aha! Minerva owed me a bottle of Auchentoshan, for she refused to believe me that Severus had been eyeing her since he had turned a teenager. 

"She could not do worse than Mad-Eye Moody," Tom continued. 

"Oh, she could," I muttered, with a delicate shudder. 

Minerva was insensible when it came to her heart. Thankfully, Severus had fought a long and determined battle to be hers. That boy had the perseverance of a cockroach. Whenever I told him so, he would scowl and call me gayer than a bucket of dead parrots. He had never learned to take a compliment, our Severus. 

"Apple butter or red currant jelly?" Tom asked me, returning to his culinary endeavor. 

"Apple butter!" I exclaimed, horrified that he would dare suggest the travesty that was red currant jelly. 

I went about to the cellar, and fetched a bottle of Gewürztraminer to go with the meal.

Tom was not fond of alcohol, as espionage and observation had long informed me, but he sipped at his wine as we dined. 

"How is your daughter?" I asked quietly. The candles on the table guttered. The Castle's magic rose anxious in us. 

He could not have hoped to keep her a secret, not while the Castle's magic had been twined in ours for decades. The headmaster and the heir. 

"Delphini," he replied, in forced calm. "That is her name." 

Delphini. 

Delphinus was the constellation in the southern reach of our skies. In the heart of Delphinus was Job's coffin, an asterism of four stars. Firenze read the stars of the coffin as the pillars of the world of magic. He saw in these stars Harry and Gellert, Tom and I. 

"Harry is well," I told him. 

Tom stilled at my words, and met my gaze in quiet gratitude.

"He was a brave child, standing before my father's tombstone, facing a madman that struggled to remember even his own name," he said crisply. "He, more than any other, deserves this peace in our times."

How far he had come, to admit freely that he had been raving insane in his quest to murder a child!

To Narcissa, our world owed all. 

"What brought you to Bonn?"

It was not an errand of government. He had retired from the public eye. Rumors went that he had taken himself to Swanage, by the Bay of Dorset, a few miles from Wiltshire where Narcissa resided in that old manor which was her dominion.

The flush that crossed his features was new. 

"A tryst?" I asked, laughing. 

"No," he said irritably. "A transaction. The press would have a field day of it were I to seek one in London."

Bonn was notorious for its Wizarding red light district. There had been rumors, in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies, that Abraxas had often hired paid boys to see to his lover, since his physical limitations disallowed him from engaging in these pursuits. 

Tom mistook my contemplation for judgement's scorn, and said, disgruntled, "I have no centaur at home awaiting me. Even you cannot call me faithless."

"When have I called you faithless?" I asked, surprised. 

His downfall had ever been his reckless faith, in himself, in magic, in love. 

For four decades, from the 1940s to 1981, he had sworn himself by bond and heart to a crippled and dying man. 

Gellert and I had not been lovers, even if our secret encounters over four decades, from the 1900s to the 1940s, had been the sole intimacy of the flesh either of us had known. 

"I must confess a degree of curiosity," he murmured, swirling his fork mid-air, lost to thought. 

"Ask away." 

I mopped up the last of the sauce with Lebkuchen, and sighed, replete. He was wasted on his pursuits of magic. He had learned to cook at Hogwarts, from the House Elves, as an exercise in managing stress during Abraxas's illness. His life had not become mellower after those days. Who would have thought that he would have something in common with Molly Weasley? 

He twirled his fork once more, frowning. If he was dilly-dallying for words, I shuddered to imagine what the matter of his curiosity might be. 

"The centaur," he began, finally meeting my gaze. "I had not known of your interest in the bestial."

Ron and Hermione were excellent publicists, even if they had landed me in notoriety, with their attempts to write of my romance with Firenze as tasteful erotica.

Fan-fiction, they called it, whenever I attempted to set them straight on the truth of the matter. 

The public drank it up. 

And the royalties were not paltry. 

Let Ron and Hermione ride that wave of interest to its natural end. It would be a matter of months, I tallied. They were children that had expected to die in a war of madmen. Let them have their silliness, even if meant writing graphically vulgar pornography about a headmaster and a centaur. 

Firenze did not read the Witch Weekly. 

During the weekends, when Harry visited us at Hogwarts, Severus and I would do the voices, and read the fan-fiction to him, delighting in how he laughed and laughed until he complained, gasping, of cramps. We had burdened Harry with death. It was perhaps penance to entertain him with this nonsense. 

Tom had believed there was credence to that puerile publication. Taken aback, I stared at him. In the last supplement, Ron and Hermione had written in garish terms of how Firenze was in rut and I played willing assistant in Hagrid's barn. 

"A sexual engagement with a centaur would be medically inadvisable," I managed to say, torn between hilarity and horror. "There is also the matter of Nicomachean ethics."

A spark of humor rose bright in Tom's expressive features. 

"Nicomachean ethics eludes Narcissa, thankfully."

"She is a Black." 

They were, the lot of them, insane. Even Sirius, Harry and I agreed, despite how we mourned him, had not been the sanest of us. 

\-----

"Potter! Stop! Cease! Desist! Abandon this folly!" Severus babbled, laughing, eyes crinkled shut, squirming as a ferret attacked him. "Please, please, I shall transfigure you back! Settle!"

The ferret settled, with a victorious strut. 

I winked at the ferret and turned it back to our Harry. 

On Severus's lap, now it was his turn to laugh in mortification. 

"Don't dump me now!" he implored, wide-eyed in faux entreaty. 

"You are as bad as Albus," Severus muttered, steadying Harry with his strong hands and gently helping him off that precarious perch. 

"Have I interrupted an orgy, perchance?" Minerva tutted, from where she stood at the threshold of my door, taking in the silly antics with a raised eyebrow.

"Come, drink with us, Minerva! It shall all make sense." 

"Severus, you have not made sense in the entirety of your existence," she protested, though the sternness slid away from her expression when Severus winked at her. 

Harry came to sit beside me on the chaise.

"How goes the search for the One?"

He was fixated upon this idea of the One. There would be one, he held, who would fill in the blanks where he had yearned. That boy in the cupboard, that brave lad who had made ready to die to appease madmen, that quiet young man who had stood beside me when the public frothed at me after I had carved the country into two to bring about this peace in our times. 

He was the one, the chosen one.

This hunt for his One, I feared, would take him to his mirror in the end, as he saw that nobody would be capable of giving him what he had given others freely and without a jot of disgruntlement at his fate. 

"Hermione told me that I should not discount searching in the Muggle world," Harry was saying. "I feel that he is a wizard. I feel-"

He hesitated.

"Your gut instinct has proven to be right every time in the past," I encouraged him. 

The four stars on the quadrilateral of Job's coffin, Firenze had stated, corresponded to two men sat upon this chaise, and another in Swanage alone raising his daughter, and another I had buried alive in stone. 

"Albus, stop encouraging his romanticism," Severus protested. "Potter, go out, get laid, and you will find yourself freed of this obnoxious idea of the One." 

"You are one to talk," Harry muttered. 

Severus had carried his torch for Minerva for twenty years, before he had managed to finally convince her that he was her occasionally charming prince capable of the loyalty and devotion that she sought. 

"The One is a destructive framing," Minerva chimed in then. "You must not shut yourself from today, Harry."

She had longed for Alastor from their schooldays, unrequited, and it had led to a desert in her heart until Severus had come along, plucky and persistent, to wage a war for her. 

"Harry's intuition has served him well so far," I said encouragingly. 

After Minerva and Severus had left, I took Harry's tense hands in mine. 

"You think me delusional," he said wryly. 

Without the trappings of a cause, he was plainspoken and bright, and the core of him remained his unflinching bravery as he awaited bitter truths. 

"Will you accompany me on an impromptu trip, Harry?" 

When had he refused me? 

\-----

"Is this-" 

Harry swallowed and set to casting impervious charms on us, to shield us from the hail.

Before us, at dawn's break, smeared against the autumn sky's psychedelic pink, was the hulking edifice of Nurmengard. In the courtyard, alone as sentinel, stood the mighty oak Gellert had planted. My first wand had been of oak. 

"The One," I told Harry. "I buried him there, deep in the hollow of stones he had raised." 

"It was not your fault," he said, steadfast, refusing to cease believing in the golden myth of Albus Dumbledore. 

I had not visited Nurmengard since that day in 1945. I stared at the castle, and wondered if he was alive, if he was sane. 

My magic lingered, cruel and decisive, in the stones, and not a speckle of the white of Gellert's sorcery stained the strong waves of blue that surrounded the castle. 

Mellowing my grief of olden days, I extended my magic to embrace Harry, ocean's blue warm about the bright holly of him. He sighed, trusting, and leaned into me, this hope's child. 

"I feel-" he began hesitantly. "I feel I will know it in my magic." 

"Powerful wizards know in their magic the skeins of another, instinctively, even without training," I told him. "That does not mean belonging, Harry. A song of power merely is a song of power."

Tom and I held a Castle together, his the evergreen that had healed the wounds Salazar had cut into her, and mine the azure that sustained her bedrock. Before us, there had been the Founders. After them, had come a line of powerful wizards who had sworn themselves to the Castle as her Headmaster, and with their deaths they had fed her the magic she needed as sustenance. 

Harry was powerful, marked a Dark Lord's equal by prophecy. Even if he knew not the reach of his magic, he would instinctively sense the currents of another. And I feared, I feared, I feared, that his fledgling attempts to reach out with his magic would draw him to the one who had mingled with his own once. Narcissa's sacrifice had undone their old and wretched bond, but magic as that left traces indelible. 

"The One, Harry, is an interesting concept," I told him, as we stood in the rain watching the castle I had buried my heart in stone. "The meaning you attribute to it may take a life of its own."

He looked at me askance. 

Hermione and Ron, and every well-intentioned friend he had, meant the One as a perfect romantic partner. Harry was unlike them. His depiction of the One was an equal. 

And I feared where his quest would lead him to. 

\-----

Firenze and I were sitting quietly in his woods. I had been reading. He had been burning his herbs to read the stars. Mallowsweet and oleander. 

"Say, were we written in the stars?" I asked curiously.

"Giving myself to you was an act of free will." He looked at me solemnly. "It has unwritten other fates." 

I returned to my reading, unwilling to hear of these other fates. 

\-----

"You are worried for the boy," Abe detected, as we drank together.

There was a dead and decomposing vampire on the bar counter, but Abe was unruffled and I could not bring myself to worry. 

I had other worries. 

"The way magic works, Abe, his loneliness will poison him!" 

"You were the loneliest bugger that lived and breathed for an entire century. I did not see that particularly affecting your obnoxious glee in living."

"I had you, Abe," I told my dratted brother. 

His expression softened. 

He poured me another. 

* * *

  
**Blue Fantasy**

_**2007** _

"He is melancholy," Severus complained, pacing restlessly before my desk. "His friends cannot understand that there is an inherent fragility to him when it comes to this subject."

"He is twenty-six," Minerva interjected. "The two of you must cease interfering in his life now!" 

"We bloody well cannot be expected to watch him pine away in loneliness as he seeks this One. There are perfectly sound gay men that Hermione has been pitching at him. He cannot settle on any of them! And he yearns, Minerva! He yearns as a swallow for spring!"

Severus, when he truly got going, could be poetic. 

Minerva turned to me. 

"You must not encourage Severus, Albus!" Then she sighed. "Oh, the two of you are as peas in a pod." 

"I shall speak to Harry," I promised. 

\----

Harry's flat in Aberdeen was barely lived in. It betrayed no marks of him, in decor or furniture, sterile and new as it looked. He crashed at Ron and Hermione's often, and came to Hogwarts on other days. 

Glum, he did not even pretend for my sake. 

"Oh, Harry," I said gently, sitting beside him on his pristine white sofa that looked as if it had come from a designer catalogue. 

"Hermione said I should find a Mr. Right Now."

I hummed. 

"I feel-" he began, frustrated, raking his hands through his hair. "I feel that I am close." 

"You feel it in your magic," I said bleakly. 

He nodded. 

\----

"When you know," I asked Firenze. "When you know, how do you decide if you must act?" 

"Act?" Firenze asked, smiling, mischievous as he became whenever I asked him silly questions about destiny and fate. "Albus, the place of my people is to observe."

"Well, surely, sometimes you must wish to avert a fate!" I exclaimed, understanding not at all this oath of passivity. 

"Have you heard of Cassandra's tale?"

"Nobody believed her." I frowned, trying to recollect the story. Ancient Greek tales were Abe's expertise. 

"She was cursed to speak of future's truths, and cursed too that nobody might believe her." 

Was the curse of the centaurs too, then? If they were to act, would they be condemned as Cassandra had been? 

\----

I stood in the grand square, alone amidst couples feeding pigeons and large groups of students hurrying to classes. The clock struck nine. Above me loomed large the majestic edifice of the Sorbonne.

Sighing, I made my way to the Chapel of Sainte Ursule. 

There was a sense of dread lingering in me, as I sensed the inevitable. The last church I had stepped foot in had been in Zagreb. 

I remembered the names slowly. Peter, the rock. Paul, who had written many epistles. Moses, holding up the Ten Commandments.

There was Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid, whom they had burned at a stake for trying to liberate them all. Voices in her head. 

In Harry's second year, they had accused him of being Slytherin’s heir. They had accused him of hearing voices in his head. 

Jeanne d’Arc had died young. Harry had never expected to survive as long as he had.

I climbed the stairs and entered the chapel. Above me was the cupola’s interior, richly decorated. The pews were empty. Candles flickered from the altars they had been set upon. The morning sun poured to the floors through the high stained-glass windows. 

I walked to the statue of the Virgin. Narcissa waited there for me. 

"Headmaster," she greeted me. 

She had aged gracefully, in wispy lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Without magic, as weak as any squib, and fearless as she faced me. 

"Narcissa."

"You came to speak of Voldemort."

"No, I came to speak of Harry," I told her. "If I gave my magic, as you did, can I break the curse of loneliness that plagues him?"

It was as a blood curse, but seeped into the magic of him, and his magic had transformed his yearning to seeking what had been taken from him by Narcissa's sacrifice in 1985. 

"That would be ill-advised," Narcissa said thoughtfully, putting two and two together. "His magic is mature. The Castle's magic in you is sentient and has a mind of its own. I cannot imagine the mixture boding well." 

Sorrow crossed her features, before her resolve replaced it swiftly. 

"Perhaps you should encourage him to take a lover."

"He has tried, many a time." 

His magic was dissatisfied, and it longed for an equal it sensed proximate. 

"Does Delphini have her father's magic? Perhaps, in ten years, a marriage might be a possibility? Harry will only be thirty-six."

Narcissa raised her eyebrows, as I broached the suggestion I knew she would react poorly to. It was Narcissa, however. She would not betray her revulsion in words.  
  
"She carries the magic of my family," she said levelly. 

We fell silent. In the nave, noisy doves flocked to each other, joyous in the sunlight. 

\----

"That prophecy is done with!" I complained to Abe. "Why would it echo in Harry's life now?"

"Albus, this plight of Harry's is of his own make. He merely need curb his magic to settle for what is available to him," my brother said pragmatically. 

Harry's magic, as bushfire, was a wild and wanting thing, and he had not yet mastered subduing it. _To have a magic stronger than your will births an Obscurial_ , Gellert had once told me. 

\----

"You are worried," Severus murmured, coming to me, where I was watching Fawkes die and burn and live once more.

"Perhaps if we were to teach him the arts of the mind, he can learn to control this yearning," I contemplated wishfully. 

"His mind is weak," Severus said dismissively, though there was no scorn in his words. He meant it as a fact. "His heart is the power of him, Albus."

 _He wears his emotions loudly_ , Severus had warned me again and again. I had failed to see where that strength might lead Harry to. 

"What are you afraid of?" Severus asked quietly. "Your worry is not my worry, I can sense." 

"What do you know of Obscurials?" 

Emotion made manifest.   
  
\----

"Can you read Harry's fate in the stars?" I asked Firenze that night. 

"His magic has long superseded his fate," he replied. "The stars know not his path anymore."

I buried my head in my hands, and cursed what I had done to the boy, to bring him to this yearning to be loved as he loved, in magic's song. 

\----

I had had my brother.

Ron and Hermione were Harry's raft, and I took heart in how he hearkened to their easy affection and adoption of him into their family.

It was a palliative to this chronic agony that beset him, but it gave me time to research and plan. 

\----

"The Wall must come down," I told Severus, as we sat at my desk once more, discussing and fighting over ideas, as once we had when we were stood upon the brink of war.

"Diplomacy, then," he said wryly. "Neither you nor I are diplomats, Albus." 

"It is time to coax Cornelius to endorse the establishment of an embassy in London." 

So it began. 

I courted Fudge, gently nudging him to reopen diplomacy between Glasgow and London. 

* * *

**Milumba**

_**2019** _

  
Delphini Lestrange was among the first hundred civilian visitors vetted to cross the Wall. 

A healer, at St. Mungo's. 

I studied her profile from files of espionage. She had Bellatrix's face and Narcissa's slim form. 

A wand of hawthorn. A core of a horned serpent. Asclepius had a staff of hawthorn, and there had been a serpent wound about this rod. I would have to ask Abe of that Greek God's tale. 

"For it is hawthorn that heals the broken heart," Firenze told me, when he saw the photograph I was absorbed by. 

"You knew," I said, furious that I had waged this battle for ten years, frightened for the Obscurial taking shape from Harry's loneliness, and Firenze had known all along. 

"Harry Potter's fate is not written in the stars anymore," Firenze reminded me. "I had seen Voldemort's fate. The ash and the hawthorn and the holly." 

Swearing, I summoned the old Hogwarts records from Armando's time. There, sure enough, in the archives, he had noted that Abraxas's wand was of ash. 

"It can be averted," I said thoughtfully. 

" Harry Potter's fate vanished from the stars more than twenty years ago, when the Wall was raised. A man without his fate is a man without his peace." 

\----

I watched Harry interact with Delphini. The castle was warm and content, and her magic washed against me in pleased currents. This was not her heir, but the girl was of his blood, and the Castle could not but be pleased. 

_Storge_ , I realized, as Harry's magic clung to Delphini's as a slow-blooming mantle of protection, the love a man bears his family.

Long ago, Tom had succored Narcissa, and on the expanse of his magic's evergreen had ever since bloomed her hawthorn. _Storge_ , Horace had termed their bond. 

\---

" _Storge_ ," I told Abe. "It might suffice." 

"Are you still going on about your Obscurial theory?" Abe asked me, skeptical.

I patted his shoulder. I had kept from him that tale of old, of Credence, frightened that it might destroy his peace and happiness. My brother had endured more than a man must, due to my failings. I refused to bring to him another grief. 

We were old men. 

* * *

**Whirlaway**

_**2020** _

"You seem content," I told Harry. 

His magic was living beauty, sparkling crimson on a sweep of evergreen, secure in the clasp of the One. 

"I am," he said brightly. 

He had begun an arrangement with Tom. Purely sexual, he claimed and believed that too. 

The happiness in him was a thing of bliss, pure and fierce, and I feared. The higher the rise, the harder the fall. And when he fell, the shock would make manifest what I had feared for more than a decade.

\-----

"Perhaps we should tell Voldemort," Severus said bleakly, as he and I pored over books describing the creation and destruction of Obscurials. 

Never before had one been created from a yearning for love. 

Harry, in this, as in all else, was incandescently himself, a child of hope. 

Yet, even hope turned poison when longed for and clung to in wretched desperation.

Ron and Hermione told Harry that he was unrealistic. Minerva told Harry that he needed to stop living with a headful of dreams. Abe thought the boy was merely idealistic. They were right, all of them, and yet they had not seen the danger lurking in Harry's fervent wish that had taken on a life of its own over the decades. 

The One.

His magic had found the One, as a sentient and unwise Castle had once found its heir and its headmaster, while Armando had yet lived. The Castle's choice had killed Armando. 

Tom had learned and lived and _endured,_ paying the cost of love, in a soul carved up and a bond of slavery willingly chosen, in deathless death and sanity's long crumbling. Whatever he might undertake, he would not love again. And when that became clear to Harry's magic-

Magic, in sentience, was ruthless. 

"Perhaps we should tell Harry," I told Severus. 

He scowled. 

"What is it?" 

"It is rather late to be telling him, isn't it?" he pointed out. "His magic is deep-rooted in its will, you have assessed. He does not stand a chance in subduing it."

No, Harry did not stand a chance against the volatile magic that brewed in him to form. I wrung my hands, frightened for him.

"Albus."

"Yes?" 

"We will see him through."

I nodded, taking comfort in his strength.   
  
\-----

Bushfires swept across Australia, claiming all in their path, tree and beast and man. 

The Castle's magic, sentient, clung to me, blind to all else but her own whim. 

I stood by the Lake of Hogwarts, under Job's coffin, and prayed for a boy I did not know to save. 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Our musical references: [**Leitmotifs, Themes, and Songs of Pandemic**](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29586945)


End file.
